Glen Cook Quotes

#1. Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.

Glen Cook

#2. I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true.

Glen Cook

#3. An old, old formula came to mind, from back when I was very young indeed. "I am a soldier." I said it first in the language I had spoken then, then repeated myself in Sleepy's own Dejagoran dialect. "I've been distracted before. I'm still alive.

Glen Cook

#4. There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

Glen Cook

#5. One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.

Glen Cook

#6. Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony. The Black Company pg 447

Glen Cook

#7. Best way out," Elmo observed laconically, "would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords."
"Sounds a little extreme," Goblin opined. "But if you want to go first, I'm right behind you.

Glen Cook

#8. She is the darkness.

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#9. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

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#10. No soldier likes the thought of losing his best friend and favorite toy.

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#11. There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

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#12. I was never really a girl, or a woman, or a human being to Raven, Case. Even though he did awful things for me. I was a symbol, an expiation, and when I insisted on becoming a person he did the only thing he could do to keep on serving the symbol and not have to deal with a flesh-and-blood woman.

Glen Cook

#13. The Lady was medicine bad enough. The Dominator, though, was the body of which her evil was but a shadow. Or so the legend goes. I sometimes wonder why, if that is true, she walks the earth and he lies restless in the grave.

Glen Cook

#14. Bragging is how criminals get caught and men with deep secrets deliver themselves to their enemies. It's bonehead human nature. We all want to look special. Knowing something is one of the best ways.

Glen Cook

#15. I am a haunted man. I am haunted by the Limper's screams. I am haunted by the Lady's laughter.

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#16. I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

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#17. I'm going to adopt you. You'd make a wonderful daughter. Hey, evil-minded future daughter number two. You heard Arkana. What do you think?" Grudgingly, Shukrat admitted, "I think she's right." "Excellent! Let's go ask your wicked future mother's opinion." We

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#18. A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse.

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#19. A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.

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#20. Truth is a deadly weapon, Lady said.

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#21. I was my usual charming morning self, threatening blood feud with anyone fool enough to disturb my dreams.

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#22. I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.

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#23. I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.

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#24. And the thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

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#25. I am the Daughter of Night. I am the Child of Darkness Forthcoming. Come to my mother or become prey for the beasts of devastation in the Year of the Skulls.

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#26. Justice has nothing to do with it. Stark, bloody, screaming, agonizing vendeance is what I'm talking about.

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#27. There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.

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#28. In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs.

Glen Cook

#29. If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.

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#30. The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.

Glen Cook

#31. Only a conquerer bothers to honor a fallen foe.

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#32. Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.

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#33. Let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent.

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#34. Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

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#35. The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

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#36. One-Eye scowled at Goblin. "Keep it up, Barf Bag. You'll be grocery shopping with the turtles." What the hell did that mean? Some kind of obscure shop talk? But Goblin was as croggled as the rest of us. Grinning, One-Eye resumed gabbling with his relatives.

Glen Cook

#37. Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.

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#38. Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

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#39. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.

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#40. The price of order," I muttered. I tried to run the dog off. It wouldn't budge.
"The cost of chaos," Tom-Tom countered. Thump on his drum. "Not quite the same thing, Croaker.

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#41. - Goblin, that was a dumb stunt.
- It sure was. Made me feel forty years younger.

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#42. This is a favorite game, matching wits with a Raker. He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another.

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#43. I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.

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#44. One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.

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#45. Where there is no waste, there is no want.

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#46. Time will unfold its leaves.

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#47. Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

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#48. Water sleeps, but Enemy never rests.

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#49. Priests of a thousand cults proclaim the essential goodliness of Man. They must be fools. All I see is people flinging themselves at the chance to do evil.

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#50. Its front sags against its neighbor to the right, clinging for support like one of its own drunken patrons.

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#51. I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.

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#52. My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.

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#53. Lady muttered some very unladylike sniggen snaggen riddly rodden racklesnatzes under her breath, then

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#54. She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

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#55. Evil is relative ... You can't hang a sign on it. You can't touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.

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#56. Maybe. We're all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!

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#57. Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records.

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#58. In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.

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#59. No one will sing songs in our memory. We are the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar. Our traditions and memories live only in these Annals. We are our own mourners.

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#60. More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.

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#61. Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.

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#62. Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?

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#63. Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The

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#64. Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.

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#65. I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.

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#66. Combat is fear and management of fear far more than it is organized murder. Those who manage fear best will seize the day.

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#67. Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

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#68. You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you're glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.

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#69. Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.

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#70. Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.

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#71. Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.

Glen Cook